 Well, thank you for joining us, Jonah. We really enjoyed your book and we're excited to talk about how to persuade people and change people's minds. How are you doing today? Oh, thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me. Well, jump right into the book. And I feel like obviously right now in this COVID time, we are all facing a lot of counterintuitive opinions and arguments and beliefs and really struggling to change our minds and others' minds around us. So I think the book is really quite insightful in terms of understanding how we as humans respond to people trying to change our minds and be persuaded. Definitely an interesting time we're in. Why are we as humans so resistant to changing our opinion? I think at the core, the way we're going about it is wrong. So when we try to persuade people, we try to change minds, we try to change action, we often take a particular type of approach and that is some version of pushing. We think if we just add more reasons, if we provide more facts, more figures, more information, people will come around and it's clear why we have that intuition. If there's like a chair sitting in the middle of a room and we want to move that chair, what's a good way to move it? Well, pushing. Pushing is usually a very good way to move physical objects. If we push a chair, it goes. When we apply that idea to people, though, it gets a little bit more complicated because when we push people, people don't just go along. They often dig in their heels, they push back, and they often even do the opposite of what we want. So rather than pushing, we've got to figure out a different way to go. And I think a lot of us, when we rationalize our change, we don't think about the emotional component. We do feel like it was the facts and the preponderance of evidence that changed our minds when we look back in hindsight, but that's really not what's going on. Yeah, I mean, I think it's also interesting, you know, there's a difference between trying to change our own behavior and trying to change others' behavior. You know, if we're a sales piece person, we might be trying to change the client's mind. If we're employee, we're trying to change a boss's mind. If we're a leader, we might be trying to change organizational culture. We often focus a lot on the change that we want to have happen, but we focus a lot less on the person or people that we're trying to change. And that's part of the problem. It turns out there's a better way to change minds. It's not about pushing. We have to think about change a little differently. For myself, that was one of the most compelling ideas in the book because it certainly changed how I viewed a lot of our marketing. So when we were doing stuff on Instagram, if we're doing some advertising on Twitter, one of the things that your book had brought to my attention that I implemented immediately and saw an instant change was taking away hurdles, which making it easier for people to follow along rather than giving them either a hurdle to jump through or having them think about something where the emotional response is going to be triggered before they're logically understanding where they're going. And by the time you're telling them to perform an action, there's where the resistance becomes where emotionally they were following right along until they were logically triggered to see that hurdle. Hurdles is a great way to talk about it. We often focus on pushing. We often focus on adding more, but the better way turns out actually to come from chemistry. And so some of your listeners may have a background and at least a little bit of chemistry, but you probably remember that change in chemistry is even harder than it is in the social world. Difficult to get carbon to turn into diamonds or plant matter to turn into oil. And so chemists often use temperature and pressure to speed the process. If you have a kernel of popcorn at your house and you want to eat it, you want to turn it into popcorn, you stick it in the microwave, you add temperature, it heats up the molecules inside, it moisture and pressure intensifies and it becomes popcorn. But it turns out there's a special set of substances that chemists often use that make change happen faster and easier. It cleans everything from the grime off your contact lenses to the oil off your car's engine and carburetor. But what's most interesting about these substances is how they create change. They don't increase the temperature. They don't increase the pressure. They actually lower the barrier required for change to occur. They remove the obstacle. And as you guys have probably guessed, these substances are called catalysts. And that's exactly why I wrote this book, right? There's a better way to change, not by pushing harder, but by finding out what those obstacles are and removing them. I think a great way to think about it is imagine your car is parked on a hill, let's say, and you want to get it to go. So you step on the gas, you step on the gas, it's not going. What do you do? You often say, well, God, I need more gas. If I just step on the gas harder, it'll go. Sometimes we don't need to step on the gas. Sometimes we just need to remove the parking brake. And so the book is all about figuring out, well, what are those obstacles, those barriers, those parking brakes that are preventing our desired action from occurring? And how, rather than pushing, can we remove the obstacles and make change more likely? And the book breaks down five common roadblocks to change and gives very compelling examples that I think we can all resonate with, whether you're parents, whether you are in sales, or whether you're in an argument and trying to persuade people. So I'd love to walk through these five, and then we could talk about some actual strategies that our audience can use to help alleviate these roadblocks. Yeah, sure. And so maybe we can pick one and dive into it a little bit. I find sometimes, if you skip across all five, people don't remember any of them. So let's pick one and I'm happy to talk about it in a little bit of depth. Well, I think the first one is the one that we all respond the most to, because we know when someone's pushing us in a certain direction, immediately that parking brake comes up and we don't want to move forward. And it's that reactance that we're talking about. You know, I think a good way to talk about reactance is, can I tell a quick story, is that all right? Yeah, please. Yeah, so I'll tell the story of Tide Pods, because I think that's interesting in today's day and age. And so some of you may be familiar with Tide Pods. They're essentially a faster and better way to do laundry, rather than having to measure out exactly how much laundry detergent they come in these little packets. And so you just chuck it in the laundry makes it easier. So Tide released these pods. They thought it could take a big chunk of the billion dollar laundry industry, but $150 million in marketing behind it. They released them. They do pretty well. But then there's a problem. And the problem very simply is that people are eating them. And so you might be sitting there going, what do you mean people are eating them? Aren't they filled with chemicals? You're exactly right. They are filled with chemicals. But people have decided there's a funny video on college humor. There's a satirical article on the onion. People have challenged each other to start eating them. It's the Tide Pod challenge you may remember from a few years ago. And so Tide is sitting there going, well, what should we do? I mean, people shouldn't be eating them in the first place. But what do we do? Well, we've got to tell them not to do it. So they release all these pressure releases saying, don't eat Tide Pods. They hire Rob Gronkowski to make these videos and say, don't eat Tide Pods. They think that will be the end of it. And the exact opposite happens. They put all this work telling people not to eat Tide Pods. And suddenly more people start eating Tide Pods. Interest in Tide Pods goes up. Visits to poison control go up as well. Essentially a warning becomes a recommendation. Telling people not to do something makes them more likely to do it. Now, you might be sitting there going, that's ridiculous that never other happens beyond this Tide Pod example. But it's actually a much broader specific example, much broader case, which is this notion of reactance. We like to feel like we're in charge. We're in control of our own actions, our behavior and our decisions. But if someone else tries to influence us, suddenly it's not clear whether we're driving our behavior or they're driving our behavior. And so what we often do is we push back. We have essentially an anti-persuasion radar, like a missile defense system or a Spidey sense that goes off when we sense someone's trying to persuade us. If a telemarketer calls us on the phone or an ad comes on the television or our spouse even tries to get us to do something, we go, oh, wait, they're trying to persuade us. Hold on, let me deploy these countermeasures to avoid being persuaded. I'll avoid the persuasion attempt. I'll ignore it. Or even worse, I'll counter-argue. Yeah, I'm sitting there listening to everything that person is saying, but rather than just listening, I'm thinking about all the reasons wrong with what they're suggesting. Why it won't work, why it's too expensive, why it's too difficult. And so really to change minds, we have to figure out how to reduce that reactance. I think our mayor here in Los Angeles, Garcetti, would certainly need to hear this because they had just put out a press release yesterday stating that at this point, if you're going outside, they want you to wear a mask. And of course, you can imagine what that pushback was like. And of course, my first reaction was, what are you talking about? I'm just going outside. Now, there's arguments to be made for the psychology of other people feeling safe and lots of other things, but just to come right out with that, of course, there was immediate pushback and we're seeing it transpire right now because this just happened yesterday. And I think that's a great example of a case where, hey, if they didn't tell you to do it, you might've even been fine doing it to begin with. You might've decided yourself, oh yeah, I'm going out. Maybe I should wear a mask. But the mere fact that they told you to do it makes you less, I mean, think about this happens often with spouses and friends. Someone says, what do you want to do this weekend? You say, oh, before the pandemic, you might have said, oh, let's go to a movie. I don't want to do that, right? They might've been fine going to a movie if they suggested it, but the fact that you suggested it, they go, oh, it's too nice outside or oh, we did that a couple of weeks ago. And so because someone else suggested it, they're less likely to do it. And so part of what the strategies that I talk about to reduce reactants are about is really figuring out, well, how do we not try to persuade people but allow them to persuade themselves? How rather than kind of selling, can we get people to buy in and make them feel like participants in that change process? And when it comes to reactants, what strategies can we employ to get people to buy in instead of sell and push? Yeah, so I'll talk about a couple and I'll, at the end at least, I'll come back to the pandemic because I recently put a piece out in HBR that talked a little bit about how to apply these ideas to kind of public health campaigns. So I think one I would start with is this idea of providing a menu. And this came from talking to a lot of great salespeople and great consultants. And what they said very simply is that you're in a pitch meeting and a little bit like I talked about already, you're making your pitch, you've got your fancy slides and your PowerPoint deck or you're on the phone, whatever it is. And you think that person's listening, right? You think that client or that boss or whoever it is you're trying to pitch is listening to your pitch. What they're really doing is they're poking holes in everything that you're saying. Yeah, sure you say your product is better, but how do I know it's gonna cost less? And is it actually gonna pan out and is this service gonna work and how is it gonna integrate with what we're already doing? Almost like a high school debate team and had a poking and prodding and figuring out all the problems with your message. And so essentially you need to give them a better job, a different job. If you give them one option, their job is poking holes in that option. And so what great salespeople, what great consultants often do is they give people multiple options. They give them a menu, at least a couple of different choices because what it does is it shifts the role of the listener. Now rather than sitting there going, oh, what don't I like about this? They're sitting there going, oh, which of these do I like better? And because they're sitting there thinking about which of them they like better, they're much more likely to choose one at the end of that interaction, right? Because they made the choice. And I call it providing a menu because you're not giving them ultimate, unlimited choice. You're not saying you can do whatever you want. You're choosing the choice set, but you're letting them choose within that choice set. And that feeling of participation, that feeling that they had a role to play makes them much more likely to go along with what they end up doing at the end. It's kind of counterintuitive. You would think, wait, if I'm giving them choices, what if they choose the thing that I don't want them to choose? But in actuality, there's always that struggle when we're only given one choice, immediately we start looking, well, what are my other options here? I can't only have one option. Yeah, and notice, by the way, that you're choosing the choice set. So I agree that someone could say, well, maybe they'll choose the option I don't want, but if you're smart about it, you give them a set of options that you're happy with whichever of those options they choose, right? Parents often talk about doing this with their kids. So rather than saying, hey, say, eat your vegetables. I don't want to eat your chicken. I don't want to. So you say, okay, which one do you want to eat first? Your chicken or your vegetables? Which do you want to put on first? These pants or your shirt? And by giving them a choice, you're giving them options. You're equally happy that they choose between, but because you're choosing the choice set, they're much more likely to go along. The other example in the book around smoking teenagers, I think we've all lived through the dare campaigns. And what was remarkable was the truth campaign and how it took a different approach to this exact problem. Yeah, so I'll talk a little about truth and I'll also talk about this campaign. Most of your listeners are probably not familiar with from Thailand that they think also does an interesting job. And so what truth did, right, is think about sort of old cigarette advertising, basically all public health messaging. It said, don't do it, don't smoke. And what kids said is, well, don't you tell me what to do, government. I'm gonna do whatever I want, right? Just like in today's day and age where you have these armed militias saying, don't you tell me to wear my mask? I'm gonna show up with my gun and not wear my mask, right? People are pushing back on what others are saying. So truth was one of the first campaigns to do is say, hey, great, you wanna react against someone? React against the cigarette companies. Because without you realizing it, they're the ones persuading you. What truth did is it said, hey, I'm not gonna tell you to do anything. I'm just gonna show you what the cigarette companies are doing to persuade you and yet you make the decision. And kids said, well, yeah, I love reactants. I love pushing back. Let me push back against the cigarette companies and screw them, I'm not gonna do what they wanna do. But there's even a better version, as I mentioned of this recently happened in Thailand. So it's this organization that's called the Thai Health Promotion Foundation. And they wanna get people to quit smoking. And the problem is if you tell people to quit smoking, what do they do? They say, no thanks. Stop telling them what to do. I'm not interested. So trying to figure out a different way to get people to quit. So they do something really interesting. They have this ad campaign but they also actually did this to a number of people where they go up to smokers and they ask those smokers for a light. Of course in most cases, someone comes up to a smoker, ask them for a light cigarette, light their cigarette, smokers would say of course. But in this case, the person who asks is an eight or nine year old child. It's a little kid, a little boy or a little girl walking up to a smoker saying, can I have a light? And smokers do what you can guess they would do. They say, no way. I'm not gonna give you a light, right? Smoke is bad for you. You get emphysema. You'll hurt your lungs. So you wanna go run and play. By the way, it's clear no one knows more about the dangers of smoking than smokers, right? They can lecture the kids all they want about all the dangers of smoking. And so the kid says, you know, okay, fine, no problem. Hands him a slip of paper and walks away. And on that slip of paper, what it says is you worry about me, but not yourself. Call this quit line to find out how to quit. And so first of all, it's hugely successful, right? Calls to quit line go up 40%. It goes viral on the internet. Millions of people view this video. But more importantly, what it does is it highlights what I'll call a gap. It highlights a gap between someone's attitudes and their actions. If you're a smoker, right? You like smoking, that's what you're doing. And someone's just come up to you and asked you for a cigarette and you've told them no. And now you're kind of stuck because your attitudes line up, right? People want those things to line up. But when they don't, we have what's called cognitive dissonance, right? Our attitudes and our actions, they don't match. I've gotta do something to fix it. I say I care about the environment, but I never recycle. It doesn't make me feel so great. I've gotta do something to bring those two in line. And so in this case, what the smokers do is they quit smoking, right? Or at least they call the quit line and they explore quitting. Not because someone told them to, but because someone pointed out that their attitudes and their actions weren't lining up and so they have to bring them in line. And so just to bring this back to the coronavirus, you know, we want someone to wear a mask. Well, if we tell them we're a mask, they're gonna say no. What if instead we say, well, hey, you know, would you want your elderly grandparent to be outside without a mask on? You know, if you're a kid, would you want your younger brother and sister to be outside with a mask on? You're a parent. You want your kids to be outside without a mask on. And if we would say no to those things, then asking, well, why are you not wearing one? Is a great way to encourage people to do it, not by telling them to, but by allowing them to participate. And I think that's the biggest point of the book in general is that we can't force people to do things. It's not going to work, but so many of us try in our daily lives, whether it's with our kids or our coworkers or in selling. And I think many of us don't realize how our own decision-making process works. We backwards rationalize things. We don't realize that a lot of our actions don't necessarily line up with our beliefs. We're walking around telling other people what to do, but oftentimes we're not following our own advice. And by asking the right questions to create that thought-provoking moment, then people start to realize, well, maybe my rationalizations aren't correct on this matter, or maybe I've been acting out of character and not realizing it. Yeah, I love the way you put it. And there's that old phrase, practice what you preach. And in some sense, what highlighting a gap does is it reminds people that their practices and their preaches aren't necessarily the same. It doesn't force them to do anything. It doesn't push them. It just says, hey, you're being inconsistent, but it doesn't say it that way because people wouldn't want to hear that they're being inconsistent and says, do whatever you want. And people go, huh, well, wow, maybe I am being inconsistent. And now maybe I should do something to it. And that, in general, I talk about, I think, four or five different strategies in the book, those are the main ideas behind the strategies of reducing reactants. It's not pushing, it's not selling, it's kind of allowing people to participate, asking questions rather than telling people what to do, encouraging them to feel like they're participants, which will make them more likely to go along. And asking those questions, you are participating in the rumination that's going on internally for them. So it's bringing out their thought process so that you both can manage it instead of just letting that thought process happen internally where we don't really have any clarity on what this person's feeling or thinking. Yeah, and I think about a doctor, for example, you know, you don't walk into the doctor's office and the doctor goes, let me put a cast on your foot. A doctor starts by saying, well, what's the problem? Right? Well, what's hurting? How long has it been hurting for? What's the issue? Essentially they do a diagnostic. Sales people don't do that with clients. Sales people start by saying, let me tell you why my product or service is so great, don't you want to listen? I brought along my 500 page PowerPoint deck. We should start with the person that we're trying to convince where that person is a spouse, a kid, a client, a boss, whoever it might be, starting with them, understanding, well, where are they in the first place? What are the barriers for them? Let's find that route, that underlying thing that's preventing them from doing what we want them to do. And then let's pick the right thing out of our toolkit to make it easier, right? It takes a little bit more effort initially, but it smooths the ride and makes it much more likely that change happens. And a lot of times our assumptions around the reasons people are doing things are wrong. They're off. So it's important to question our own assumptions and allow the other person to explain their thought process behind it. Yeah, I mean, this is so true. I was talking to a friend and colleague of mine who was trying to get something adopted at his university and he spent months on this particular project and it goes all the way up to the dean and eventually the dean says no and the guy is so bummed because he put all this work in and I sort of said, well, why did the dean say no? He was kind of like, well, I'm not exactly sure, right? But he was so focused on, oh, the dean said no, how bummed I am. Well, I said, well, hey, if you figure out why he said no, you might actually be able to change it around, right? You might be able to have a better chance. And so starting with that, well, why is the person not changing? What are those barriers makes it easier? When we're talking about behavior change and other big component of this is people are just resistant to change. We wanna keep doing what we've always been doing. It's our comfort zone. And the second point of endowment, I think we've all run up against that where we wanna help change someone's habits. We want them to be more healthy. We wanna help them socially, even in our coaching practice, we've run up against this exact thing where, well, we've been doing it a certain way. It doesn't feel uncomfortable to me to keep doing it this way. So why should I change? Yeah. And so this is what psychology would call the status quo bias. We tend to be attached to the stuff that we're doing already. New things also feel risky and that's sort of the cost of uncertainty and uncertainty tax. And maybe we'll talk about that in a couple of minutes. But old things also feel so comfortable and easy. But it feels costless to stick with what I'm doing already. I know it. It's comfortable. Think about moving homes, for example. Right? Well, I know where I live right now. It may not be perfect, right? But at least I know it. I know all the good things and all the bad things. It's easier. People dating, they often talk about this and dating. Like, yeah, I'm not so happy with the person I'm dating. But God, if I go out there and I break up with this person, I gotta find someone new. It's gonna be so difficult. And so, you know, it's often really easy to stick with what we're already doing, even if it's not perfect. Do you find that there is a mechanism in which people familiarize and personalize these strategies to themselves? Obviously, they know that there's other ways to be doing things. They see other people doing them in different ways. Though they've been doing it for so long and you mentioned that bias. But also, I find it that they personalize it the world they say, well, for me, I do it this way. And it's like, well, we know that. That's why we're here. That's why we're discussing different ways. And an attachment is one thing, but when you personalize it, it's become so fixed. Yeah, I mean, I think you guys talked a little about this already, but it's basically this idea of motivated reasoning, right? Like, if we want something to be true and someone tells us some information that's consistent with it, we'll leave them. If we don't want something to be true, we go, well, do I have to believe that this is true? And I do all this work to sort of figure out how it's not likely to be true. And so same things with our own behavior, right? If we're doing something, we tend to think it's the right thing. Sure, you know, that other thing might work for another person, but it wouldn't work for me. And so we think about all the reasons why it wouldn't work rather than all the reasons why it would. And so we're motivated to make it not work even though it might actually be quite effective. Once you break the glass on that idea and you are open to doing things in a new way, life opens up and becomes so much more fun. And but it's just so difficult to get people to see what life can be if you open yourself up to these ideas. Yeah, you know, I used to have a sticky note above my desk a number of years ago that said, what's the worst that will happen? And I wrote this down because I was dealing with exactly what you're talking about it in my own life, right? And now I sometimes I give this advice to other people, but sometimes, you know, we're like, oh, well, you know, it'll just, it won't work. And I think really thinking about what is the worst, not, you know, not what's the most like it, what's the worst that could happen? And often once you go down that road, you actually realize that the worst thing wouldn't be that bad. You know, oh yeah, I buy the wrong product. Okay, well then in a couple of years, I'll buy a new one. You know, if it's a really big decision, okay, then maybe any of it's a house or a spouse or having a kid, those are harder to turn around. But you know, a product or a service, it's not that even, even that difficult. And even, you know, worst case with a spouse or house worst case, you get divorced, you buy a new house, you change your job, even with these big decisions, you know, the worst case is not actually that bad. And sometimes, you know, it'll say we have nothing to fear, but fear itself. Sometimes we're so, the uncertainty is what we're worried about, right? We're actually, that's what we get caught up in, not the worst thing. This happened to me recently, actually, I was, this is a number of months ago while people were still flying, but I was flying to speak at an event and the flight was late. And it keeps getting pushed back and it keeps getting pushed back and keeps getting pushed back. And I'm going, oh my God, I'm gonna miss this meeting. Oh my God, I'm gonna miss this meeting. You know what, I'm so worried about it, right? And eventually, the flight gets pushed back so far that I'm definitely gonna miss the meeting. And you would think now the worst possible outcome has been realized, right? The worst possible thing would be that I'd missed the meeting and now I've found out that I've missed the meeting and so I should be despondent. But I'm actually fine, right? Because the worst thing is actually the uncertainty. Missing the meeting is bad, it's not good to miss the meeting, but once you know that you missed the meeting, you figure out a way to solve it. What's often worse is the uncertainty, the not knowing. There's lots of research that says it's really the not knowing that's bad. And so part of what we need to do is change agents as catalysts is reduce that uncertainty for me. And I think right now, you know, we're feeling that exact point. So many people are telling us, oh, use this opportunity to create massive change, be the catalyst in your life, start that new business, do that new thing, pick up that new habit. But unfortunately with uncertainty, our human nature actually wires us to hit the pause button, not to make the big change, not to take the leap. Yeah, there's this study I talk about in the book that was out of Stanford University from a couple of years ago. They basically asked people, not decades, not a couple of years, but they asked people to imagine you take an exam, you know, it's a, you know, feel run down, you pass the exam, do you wanna go on this vacation? Yes, no, or do you wanna wait? Most people say I'll take the vacation, right? Pass the exam, I feel good, I'll take the vacation. They asked some other people, hey, imagine you took this exam, same basic scenario, except these people fail. So you took an exam, you found out you failed the exam, but you could go on vacation, do you wanna go on vacation? Can't take the exam again until next semester, most students say, well, I'm feeling bad, I'll take the vacation, right? So my pass will take the vacation, I fail, I take the vacation. But a third group is told they don't know, there's uncertainty. You'll find out in a couple of days whether you pass or you fail. Now what I love about this study is the decision tree is clear, right? And I'll draw a little decision tree here, right? If you pass, you take the vacation. If you fail, you take the vacation. So even if you don't know, even if you're up here, you should take the vacation. Yet what do people do? They hit that pause button, right? They say, oh, no, I'll wait. And that's what we do all the time. Uncertainty makes us wait, which is really great for whatever we're doing currently, you know, sticking with our old jobs, sticking with our old way of exercising, our old way of doing things, but it's terrible for change, right? Because uncertainty causes us to do nothing. Yeah, and we hear historically that these are opportunities for that change. These are the moments where we can set aside systems that are broken, we can look at our life in a different light, but that pause button is looming large in all of our lives. So how can we create that catalyst for others to change dealing with uncertainty and the uncertainty tax? For me, the best way to ease uncertainty is to lower the barrier to trial. It's basically how can we figure out, rather than us trying to persuade someone, let me tell you how great this product is, how great the service is, why you should do what I want. How can I stop persuading you and again, get you to persuade yourself? And so one way is to make it easier for you to experience what I want you to do. So I'll use an example in a product or service context and what we'll sort of generalize it, but think about Dropbox. So billion dollar business, hugely successful. Number of years ago though, they come out initially, had a lot of problems, had trouble getting customers. Why? Because there was an old way of doing things. People were used to storing their files on their computer. There was this new way, Cloud Storage, which Dropbox was one of the leaders in the space, but people are sitting there going, I don't know what Cloud Storage is, where's the cloud? What happens if the cloud goes down? I'm so used to doing what I'm doing before, you say your way is better, but how do I know it's better? And so Dropbox talked about buying search ads. They talked about trying other types of advertising, but they didn't think it would work. What they landed on was giving away the product for free. And you might be sitting there going, what do you mean give it away for free? They gave away two gigabytes of storage for free. They gave away some of their service for free. And you might say, how do you make money giving away something for free? Every kid with a lemonade stand knows you gotta get people to charge. They didn't give it all away for free. They gave two gigabytes of storage away for free. And if you hit that two gigabyte limit, well then you have to pay for more storage. They use what's called freemium, right? And most of us are familiar with at least some version of freemium, even if we're not familiar with the term. But you go to the New York Times, they give you some articles for free, but eventually you have to pay for a membership. You use Skype, for example, you get certain features for free, but there's a set of premium features you might have to upgrade to if you want those features. You use Pandora, you have to have ads, you wanna get rid of the ads, you gotta pay for it. What this model does, it gives you something which is great for people, people like free, but it's also great for the company because by giving people something, it lowers that barrier to trial. It says, hey, rather than me telling you Skype, Dropbox, Pandora is great, you check it out yourself. If you like it, come back and pay us some money. If you don't like it, stick with what you're doing before. And what it does is it allows people to experience the value because they experience the value, they're much more likely than to be willing to pay to upgrade, which is exactly what happened with Dropbox and a lot of other businesses. It's not just freemium, it's lowering the barrier to trial and reducing uncertainty. Think, for example, about test drives of a car. So free version and premium version, but it relies on the same idea. It says, yes, I think this car is great, but let me have you sit in it and check it out and drive it for a day. And if you like it, then come pay us some money. And so I would say whether we're trying to change our own behavior or whether they're trying to change others' behavior, how can we give them essentially a microversion of that experience, a sample of what we're offering, a sample of what we want someone to do and allow them to see for themselves. And if they like it, they'll be much more likely to do it. Yeah, and it becomes a lot easier then for them to rationalize that emotional response that they just had of, oh, this is really easy. I thought storing on my hard drive and lugging my computer around would be the easier way, but actually having it in the cloud, being able to access it on my phone, it's a lot easier and now I'm emotionally, in turn, ready to go and start paying. Yeah, and I think what's interesting about the pandemic, you've talked about it a couple of times and alluded to it, is it's forced us to change our habits, right? Whereas bosses before might've said, you got to come into the office, yeah, working from home sounds great, but people aren't gonna get their work done. It's forced bosses because people have to work from home, now people are working from home. If you like exercise and you used to go to the gym, you can't go to the gym anymore. You got to figure out whether running or doing something else. There may have been, think grocery store, you might've thought about grocery delivery, but never been willing to try it because you'll say you like going to the grocery store. So many things that you did before that have been forced to change, you essentially been forced to try some new things. And what's great about those new things is they're better than you thought they were, now you're gonna stick with them, not everything, right? You're not gonna do all, if you tried running and you hate running, you'll go right back to the gym as soon as it opens. But if you learn something from that trial, you're much more likely to stick with it. And so anytime we're trying to get someone to do something, whether it's a product, a service, or even an idea, how can we lower that barrier trial? How can we make it easier for them to sample what we want them to do and actually see it's not as bad, as risky, or as emotionally negative as they might've thought? And just to go along with that, certainly for the online companies and the platforms, everything has been designed so well and already been, the time has been put in to figure out how to make these things as usual or friendly as possible. So of course, once they're set up, it is very easy to know, I get you hooked, you're gonna be bad. Yep. It becomes very fun. But notice, by the way, that that only works if the product or service is good. If you have something that's terrible, what I love about freemium and the idea of lowering the barrier trial is if your car's terrible, people sit and go, yeah, thanks for the trial, but thanks. And so really what is nice about freemium is it's good for both sides, right? It's good for consumers, you get to experience something and it's good for brands. If you got something that's really good and you allow people to experience it, they'll realize how good or valuable it is. Now I think in all of these examples, the person we're trying to persuade or the mind that we're trying to change, they need to feel agency. They need to feel as though they are making the choice and in all these examples, it involves listening and listening to that person on a deeper level to really understand them. And how can we become better listeners? Many of us are in roles where we have to persuade people and all we're thinking about is that end goal and it's often difficult for us to meet the end goal that we have in mind and listen to the level that it takes to give that person, the agency, the choice, the menu, all these great things we talked about. Yeah, there's a lot of research on listening. I've talked to some great listeners but also reviewed a lot of the literature and listening actually has three pieces. And I think we understand that intuitively but we don't always call them out. And so the first is attending. If we don't attend to what someone is saying, there's no way we're gonna hear what they're saying. And so it's really about paying attention. The second is understanding. We may have paid attention but I may have misunderstood what you said. And so even though I paid attention, doesn't guarantee I understand. But even if we understand really listening, we have to show that person that we listened. It's not enough to actually have understood what they said. We have to indicate to them that we've understood for it to have an impact on them. But yes, we might have heard it but if they don't know that we listened, it's not gonna have the beneficial impact. And so a lot of the strategies and approaches to listening is really not just having listened but having shown to other people that you listened. People talk a lot about something called emotion labeling. Where I use this often with our son where I say, you sound like you're really frustrated. You sound like you're really angry. Now, that doesn't mean that it's okay to be angry but it means that I've heard that you're feeling this way. And not I'm ignoring this thing and it's jumping right to the solution. But acknowledging that I've heard what you said and even if it's not something I like, I still heard it. And I talked to some hostage negotiators as part of this book. And they talk about using this strategy a lot where it's really kind of showing that you understood, hey, this is why that person's hold up in there with two hostages. This is why this person wants to commit suicide. This is why this person wants to do this bad thing. I mean, I'd agree with the reasons why they're doing it. I may not wanna let them do those things that they wanna do but at least acknowledging that I've heard what they said is gonna make them feel listened to which is gonna make them much more likely to come around, right? This happens often in disagreements with spouses and friends, right? Someone says something and someone says, no, no, this is what I want. And the first person says, you didn't hear me. And so I think part of that is just literally saying, hey, not just saying I've heard you but showing I've heard you. Let me repeat back to you what you said or label your emotions so it's clear that I not only attended and understood but you know that I understood. And the fact that you know that is gonna make you trust me at least a little more. And we're testing those assumptions because sometimes you might mislabel the emotion and they might not be feeling that at all. And of course, if you're trying to persuade someone and you're not even putting them in the right bucket, you're gonna have a very different time. That's such a good point, right? It's like a doctor. If you misunderstand, if you misdiagnose the problem, you're gonna bring out the wrong tool for the solution. And so I think the powerful thing about some of these approaches, emotion labeling, talking back, saying what you heard in a nice positive way, is it both shows that you paid attention but also as you said, test that assumption because that assumption is wrong or you didn't understand it all the way, they'll correct you but now you have a good sense of where they are and you may not agree with them but at least you know what problem you're trying to solve. And the other point that I think is difficult for people to grasp is for so long, certainly in certain cultures, we've all been speaking the same language. We've been having the same information, we've been schooled the same and we're speaking on a level that all of us completely understand where the information age has opened up as many different communities, many different cultures, many different, and this is not only cultures for ethnicities and geographical areas, we're talking about cultures and communities such as the gamer community and this community and all of these different communities have their own language, they have their own definition for the words and so we're now seeing where active listening has become something that we need to develop at such a level to be able to have real conversations that in the past we had taken for granted. Yeah, I think you're very right. I mean, part of it is we assume we all have the same reality whereas in some cases, we don't, right? There are different pieces of information, there are different things going on, there are different concerns that people have and those things matter and then the more we at least call them out, again, we may not agree with them but the more we say, okay, well, these are the assumptions that you're building on. Startup founders often talk about this, right? But they say, look, when I have a disagreement with another founder in my organization, two founders within a company and they're trying to figure out what to do, we start by making sure we're relying on the same facts, right? Because we can get to a different conclusion from the same facts but the first place to start is, well, are we even agreeing on what the facts are because part of where the disagreement might be is, hey, we're not looking at the same information and actually when I have access to the information that you have access to, I make the same decision you do and so it's not that we disagree, it's once you give me that information, I realize where you're coming from. Now, there may be other cases where even once I have the same facts, I disagree but at least giving access to the same information, make sure that we're more likely to get on the same page. And the pattern that arose in the book for me around the hostage negotiation is just the use of team speak and understanding that in a lot of times that we're trying to persuade someone, it can feel adversarial, especially if we're not choosing the right words and understanding that if you want to change someone's mind, they have to feel like you are on their side, you can't be setting up this, well, you need to do this, you need to do that, but it said, hey, let's work on this together, we're gonna solve this problem even though you don't want them to jump off the bridge or you don't want them to shoot the hostage. Yeah, I mean, even think about the way we use pronouns and so I'm doing a bunch of work at the moment with a colleague named Grant Packard who's sort of an expert on language and he has a bit of work on pronouns, but let's say we're having a bad connection on this call. There are different ways to use language to talk about that. I can say, hey, you need to speak louder. What does that suggest? It suggests it's your fault. I can suggest we have a bad connection. Now it's not your fault, together we have a bad connection. I can say, I can't hear you. That's taking responsibility saying, maybe you're speaking loudly, maybe you're not, but part is maybe me, I can't hear you. And just by using different pronouns to describe what's happening, we have a bad connection, I can't hear you, you're in there, but I can't hear you as different than you need to speak louder to me. While the same quote-unquote information may be there, the assigning of blame, the question of who's in control, who has responsibility, and all those things is different. And so I think in the past few years, doing some of this research, I've become much more attuned to very subtle differences in language, right? Where often people disagree because one person feels like the other person is assigning blame. They may not even be assigning that blame, but the language they're using assigns that blame. So whether it's team speak, you know, saying, hey, we're on the same team, let's solve this together. I'm here to help you. You know, whatever it is that shows, hey, maybe we're together rather than separate, it's gonna bring you a little bit more to my side. To go along with that, I've certainly have seen and been a part of arguments where you've agreed on the same thing, but because the language is slightly different, people are talking past each other. Once again, we're getting that out of place where we've taken for granted in the past that we all came and were educated and had that same language. With the information age, though it has connected all of us, it has put us all in our own worlds in our own language. Yeah, it certainly has. And I think, you know, things may mean different things to different people and we gotta be careful of that. And I think right now, especially we're seeing this in the information age, we all have our supporting evidence right now. Whether you are a conspiracy theorist or whatever side of the aisle you're on, you can find that supporting evidence and that often doubles your resolve to not wanna change. Do you feel that it's become harder to persuade people with this glut of information now and the accessibility to evidence that furthers your beliefs, even if that evidence is flawed? I agree with you. First of all, I do agree, but even backing up for a second, you know, I think you made a really nice point about the way that information and the plethora of information has allowed people to do things, right? So it used to be, you know, if your doctor tells you to do something, you generally do that thing. Now if the doctor tells you what you wanna hear, you go along with that doctor, but if the doctor doesn't tell you what you wanna hear, you go back home and you look at Dr. Google and you look at all the other information until you find a piece that agrees with what you wanted to believe. You know, whether you wanna call that motivated reasoning, whether you wanna call that confirmation bias, we kind of search for information until we find something that agrees with us and the internet has made it much easier to do that. And so I think as a result, as you said, you know, it in some ways, not on every dimension, but particularly on things in which there's more information available has made it harder to change people's mind because if they wanna find a reason why you're wrong and they're right, it's easier to find some reason. Even that reason isn't necessarily the case, isn't true most of the time or may not be from the most reputable source, right? There's kind of this notion that because it's on the internet, it must be true. And I'm very interested to see what's gonna happen in five or 10 years now of all these sort of questions of fake news and disinformation, whether that will change. But I think for the most part, you know, we're sort of, we go on the internet, if there's a piece of information, we assume it's from a good source, but it's not always the case. And sometimes we then rely on faulty information. And the last piece that I found so remarkable from the book, and I know a lot of people in our audience struggle with this concept of awkward pauses. And a lot of people in our audience feel that they're awkward in conversation. And because of that, they avoid pauses. And they try to barrel through their points, barrel through their argument, and it speeds up the pace of communication. But you point out that pauses are actually really powerful when we're trying to persuade someone. Yeah, so what I will say by the way is I'm terrible at this. So, you know, I like everybody else when you get excited, when you get nervous, you tend to talk faster, right? Yeah, either because you're anxious about something or because you're excited about something. We're actually doing some research now and sort of communicating via voice versus written communication. And what you see is that one reason that written communication has some benefits is you get a chance to think through what you're saying, whereas with voice communication, you kind of get excited, you start talking, you know, you have your train of thought, but it's different in some important ways. And so if you look at pauses, you see a few interesting things. You know, first what pauses do is they encourage people to sit a little bit closer, right? So if I speak more slowly, you start to get drawn in to what I'm saying. Now, I did a bad job of that. I did a terrible job of that, but I've watched very persuasive people whether you talk about President Obama did this a lot. There's a great teacher at Wharton, one of my first years I sort of sat in on his class. He got amazing ratings, I'm sitting there going, is his class that good? Like, are they learning that much? I'm like, why do people love him as a teacher? And what I realized is he did a really good job of speaking slowly. He encouraged me because he spoke slowly to really kind of pull up their chair and lean in a little bit and listen harder. And they're doing more work to pay attention, which makes them more likely to learn something in the end. But what pausing also can do in interactions, you know, sales interactions or persuasion interactions is they can encourage people to agree. And so we're doing some research on this at the moment, but imagine I'm giving you a long explanation or I'm trying to persuade you of something and so I'm sort of laying out some points. Every time I pause, there's a tendency of you, the listener or me if I'm listening to you, to kind of go, uh-huh, okay, or shake my head, yes. So think about when you call customer service and they're giving you a long explanation. If you sit there for 10 minutes and you don't say anything, it feels a little awkward. So you tend to fill in those pauses by saying, yeah, uh-huh, okay, and what that does is you're implicitly agreeing with what they're saying, right? Whether you actually agree with it or not, you're implicitly agreeing with what they're saying, which means at the end when you rate them on how helpful they are or how much their solution was useful, you're more likely to agree because you spent the whole conversation agreeing. And so that in some way is one of the things pauses allows people to do. Not only does it allow them to draw them in, not only does it allow them to think about what you're saying. If it's complicated, they can think through it, but it also encourages them to go, yeah, uh-huh, which makes them at the end of that conversation. Well, I agreed with that person a bunch. I agreed with that AJ said a bunch. He must be right. Makes it more likely to be persuaded. The pauses have a way of holding your attention, and as you were saying, there's the implicitness, but also even on the internet, when we're looking for entertainment and there's so many talking heads who are just going to be going, giving off their point of view. And of course, you're gonna settle with one that aligns with your worldview where you have that agreement where you feel good. And that puts you in a position where you're gonna pay attention, where the pauses have that same effect, where the minute I don't agree, I'm just going to tune out. Yeah, and so a little bit of it is just giving you that opportunity to be present, to be part of it, right? If the person just continuously talking, you never have time to think or agree. I also feel in a lot of these situations, especially when we think about people who aren't good salesmen and they're trying to force us to make a decision, if you don't create space for the person to maybe disagree with you if your assumption is wrong or to voice their opinion, they're gonna feel forced in a box and less persuadable. I deal with this all the time when doing interviews just like this one, right? So I sit here going, hey, how long a story should I tell? I think stories are good because they draw audience members in, but I also recognize if I'm talking nonstop, but you guys, you don't have an opportunity to chime in with your thoughts and enrich the discussion and take it in a different direction. And so I think there is always this question of kind of should I pause or not? And I think the answer at least I've seen so far is that we should pause a little bit more than sometimes we think is right. Not terribly like I did before and awkwardly, but give people at least a little bit of a break every so often to think, to agree. As you said, if you disagree to raise your hands, say I disagree to chime in there, give them those opportunities. I know from our experience in videotaping our clients communicating, oftentimes our internal awkwardness meter is off. We tend to judge ourselves more harshly than the other person is feeling or experiencing because they're running through their own thoughts and machinations as they're trying to reason through the argument. So internally it may feel like a long awkward pause, but actually in the cadence of a conversation, it's a blip, it's not awkward at all. Yeah, I mean, we as communicators, particularly voice communication like we're doing now with images added to it, while you're talking, I'm spending time processing what you're saying, looking at what you're doing, thinking of what I'm saying next. I don't have a lot of time to notice, I'm worried enough about me to notice every single thing that you might feel is awkward. And the same is true in most interactions, people are worried a lot about themselves. And so the easier we can make it for them, the better it's gonna go. Now, the big part that we're all experiencing as well right now working from home is we're not in the room together. And body language is an important part of communication. And even in this lovely Zoom, I can't see your hands, we're just floating heads. What is the impact of body language on persuading someone and is there a better way to go about this if we're forced to communicate over video and not be together? Body language certainly matters. And there's a lot of research on different aspects of body language that may be important. I think though, there are other features that matter too. There's what we say, the content, there's how we say it, the perilinguistic cues, things like pausing, things like speech rate, things like tone. We can use all of these tools as vehicles for persuasion. And so while it would be ideal for all of these avenues to be available, even when one like body language is shut off, we can use some of these other channels to do it. We may not be as effective in those channels, but the more we learn about those channels and what helps across those channels, the more effective we can be. I'll go back to some of the written and voice work we're doing, we're doing some research right now that suggests that when people communicate via voice, they use more emotion in what they're talking about. Because written tends to be a little bit more deliberative, I'm gonna think about what I'm gonna say before I put it out there. I'm in a mindset that makes me a little bit more cognitive, which is good in some ways. But if I'm writing a restaurant review, I may use less emotional language, which may actually be less persuasive on you, the listener, not due to my intent, but due to the channel that I chose to speak through. And so I may, if I'm trying to be persuasive, I may wanna use voice because it allows me to take advantage of some things I can't do just written. I love that. And the book was fantastic, The Catalyst. Please check it out. And what is your next project, Contagious Catalyst? I feel like you got another book with a seed coming out here soon. You know, I am, The Catalyst just came out. I'm gonna sit on this one for a little while, doing a lot of speaking and consulting around it. You know, I will say I'm doing a lot of research on natural language processing, sort of pulling behavioral insight from textual data. So everything like, you know, there's a customer service phone call, one of the words that agent uses that makes you the customer more satisfied. We're reading online content, one of the ways of writing that lead to longer reads, sort of parsing behavioral insight from textual data. So that's a lot of the stuff I'm working on, but we've got a number of years before that's ready for another book. We'll have you back, yeah. That is fantastic. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us, Jonah. No problem. Thanks so much for having us. Be free.